Government by Malicious Autopilot

[Passages]

The hostile takeover of federal IT systems is intended to use technology to reach preordained conclusions.

by David Dayen February 10, 2025

When the “Department of Government Efficiency,” proposed by shadow president Elon Musk, was reimagined from an outside advisory group making recommendations on federal spending to a temporary organization inside the U.S. Digital Service, a division of the Executive Office of the President, I thought it was partially a way to avoid transparency and disclosure rules for advisory commissions. The U.S. Digital Service’s mission is to modernize and improve government technology and software, and a lot of people scoffed at the idea that a plan to cut trillions of dollars in spending would suddenly devolve into an IT upgrade.

But if you read the executive order that made this transformation, it outlines DOGE’s task clearly. There’s a little clause in there ordering agencies to grant DOGE “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.”

That’s pretty much what DOGE has been doing, storming databases and systems across agencies. We’ve talked a lot about the control of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the government’s primary payment system. They’ve gained access to records at the Small Business Administration, and federal employee data at the Office of Personnel Management, and scientific data at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and student data at the Department of Education, and the IT systems of the Labor Department and General Services Administration. ProPublica reports that DOGE will look at the Central Accounting Reporting System, a database that tracks financial flows across the government. If there’s a federal agency or piece of software not on that list, they’re probably coming for it soon.

Much of this is either possibly or definitely illegal, and so potentially damaging to governmental functioning that one agency has labeled it an insider threat. Lawsuits have been filed, and injunctions and limitations have been issued in some cases. But the question that hasn’t been totally answered is: Why does Musk want this access?
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-02-10-government-by-malicious-autopilot/